


Here With Me

by justanothersong



Category: Supernatural
Genre: A lot actually - Freeform, Aliens, Alternate Universe - College/University, Alternate Universe- No Supernatural, Based on the tv series Roswell, Because we all know they would have potty mouths, Cos I am nothing if not a hopeless fan girl, F/M, Foul Language Aplenty, Hiding in Plain Sight, M/M, On the Run, Roswell, Roswell AU, They swear in this one kids, Yes I said aliens
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-06-11
Updated: 2015-06-12
Packaged: 2018-04-03 21:17:11
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 4
Words: 5,998
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/4115223
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/justanothersong/pseuds/justanothersong
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>An average day at work gets Dean Winchester shot - and miraculously healed moments later. Suddenly his world is turned upside down as a former classmate looks to be a lot more than anyone suspects. Maybe there really is something more in Roswell than tacky tourist attractions after all?</p><p>  <i>Based on the tv series <b>Roswell</b></i></p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

One of the best things about Harvelle’s Roadhouse was the lack of novelty; it simply was what it was, good food, good beer, and good prices, a haven of normalcy in a town that often bordered into the ludicrous. If Dean had to work at one of the joints that gave in to the tourist schtick, he would have been walking around with a pair of bobble-headed alien antenna atop his head, or a uniform printed with silver saucers and little green men. 

Thankfully, the Roadhouse and its owner, Ellen, refused to play any part in the tourist trade.

Dean didn’t mind working there at all; it kept money in his pocket, and he got to spend most of the day with one of his best friends, the owner’s daughter, Jo. She waited tables while he bussed them, the two working in concert to keep moving people in and out, and gathering up better tips than either would have garnered at the Cover-Up Cafe. All in all, it wasn’t a bad gig for a college student, even if he did have to deal with swarms of his old high school classmates on a regular basis.

Until the day it was all quite literally shot to hell.

 

He didn’t see how it started, not that he needed to. Dean knew all too well enough that any argument, no matter how small, could escalate to violence very quickly; he’d gotten suspended from school enough as a teenager to be a living testament to that fact. He had been in the kitchen when he heard the shouting, Jo’s voice raising above that of two gruff, angry-sounding men, alerting Dean of the trouble.

He wasn’t too surprised; it was a Friday night, after all, and though it was still early enough to be light outside, it didn’t take too many beers to raise the hackles of the wrong sort of crowd. There had been a couple of bikers seated in Jo’s section not long before Dean had ducked into the kitchen, and he had been wary of them from the start; he had always has a knack for getting a good feel of people, and something had been off about them, eyes a little too wide and a little too quick to dart from face to face.

“Look,” Dean heard Jo shouting. “I don’t care about the bill, just take it the hell outside, now!” A slim blonde with an attitude, she never let her size or sex hold back her need to take charge, though Dean often worried over her tendency to try and bully their more unruly patrons into leaving her mother’s restaurant.

Dean made it out into the dining area just as the table was sent crashing to the floor, glass and cutlery flying. He grabbed Jo by the arm and roughly yanked her back, out of the way of a large grizzled man in a leather vest and jeans as he hit the floor, clearly thrown back by his dinner partner, a slimmer fellow with gaunt features, a bomber jacket, and a slick, slimy expression.

“Think you can cheat me, huh?” the slimmer man spat, even as his companion got to his feet.

“I said take it outside!” Jo interjected, pulling her way out of Dean’s grasp and trying to get between the two arguing men. “We don’t want any trouble here, you can just -”

She didn’t see the gun that the slim man pulled from his jacket, glinting silver in the late afternoon light still spilling in from the front windows. Dean spotted it, and the world started moving in slow motion.

His only thought was to get Jo to safety, visions of the girl sitting by his side in a playpen while their mothers chatted intermingled with memories from junior high and high school, even registering for their first college classes together. All he could think to do was to get her away, to shield her from whatever was coming, and in the blink of an eye he had stepped forward and pulled her back, pushing her behind him and turning towards the men, hoping to stop what was about to happen before it did.

The shot was deafening, even as the other patrons screamed at the sight and sound of the gun. Jo was yelling something but Dean couldn’t quite hear it, his ears feeling full and watery from the sound of the blast so close to him. He was dimly aware that the men were running now, out into the waning daylight, and he thought ‘good, they’re going’.

It was several seconds before he realized he was on the ground, laying flat and face down, with an awful burning pain radiating from his chest. Jo was screaming now and there was a lot of running, but Dean couldn’t seem to distinguish one sound from another, everything seeming muddy and far away. He felt his body go limp as gentle hands turned him over, homing in on the sound of a deep gasp just above him.

 

It took a few more seconds for Dean’s eyes to focus, and when they did he found himself staring at a deep blue gaze, brow creased with worry and no small amount of concern and pain in the hooded eyes that stared down at him.

Pink lips were moving, seemingly out of sync with the cacophony of noise surrounding them, but Dean couldn’t focus, couldn’t hear what the man was saying.

Castiel, Dean thought suddenly, recognizing the face that hovered above him. Flashes came to him, nods of the head in crowded high school hallways, taking a flyer from a the other man at the Eastern NMU campus courtyard, even knocking around a baseball together on an asphalt playground in grade school.

Castiel Malcolm, Dean remembered, a kid from his high school that he’d known since the second grade. The other man was older by a year, but small schools in desert towns kept people close, and everyone always seemed to know everyone else. Dean smiled, trying to seem friendly, even though he couldn’t understand what Castiel was saying, or why his extremities were beginning to feel so cold.

“You’re alright,” Castiel was saying, as Dean was told later by Jo, who had ceased her screaming once an ambulance had been called. She had hovered close by as Castiel knelt next to Dean, cradling his head with one hand as he spoke in his quiet, gruff voice.

“You’re alright, Dean, you’re going to be fine,” he said, and pushed up Dean’s black Roadhouse t-shirt, revealing what Jo insisted had been a mess of blood and bone on his chest. Castiel had gently laid his hand over the mess, Jo said, before letting Dean’s head rest back on the ground and gripping his bicep tightly with his free hand.

There had been light, Jo told him. Bright and beautiful, like nothing she had ever seen before.

And then Dean could breathe again, big gulping deep breaths of cool air into his burning lungs, warmth filling him from head to toe and sending a tingling sensation up and down his spine.

“See, you’re fine,” Castiel told him, and Dean could hear it this time. “You just -- you just fell, is all. Knocked the window out of you.”

Something wet and messy landed on Dean’s chest, and he glanced down to see a pile of the house special spaghetti with marinara glopped onto his shirt from the floor.

“You just fell,” Castiel repeated.

Behind him, Dean heard the blue-eye man’s brother hiss, “Castiel, we have to go! Now!”, all the while dragging him to his feet.

“Please… please don’t tell,” Castiel said in a hurried whisper, even as Dean sat up, staring after him in confusion.

Castiel’s brother pulled him out the door and they broke into a run just as sirens began wailing nearby. Dean glanced up at Jo, who was staring down at him with wide eyes, hands pressed over her mouth, gaze glued to the mess on his chest. He pushed at the cold noodles, letting them fall to the floor, and froze when his fingertip caught on a tear in his t-shirt: a perfectly round bullethole.


	2. Chapter 2

Castiel’s hands were shaking even as he gripped the steering wheel on his hand-me-down Jeep, driving so fast that the wind whipped through his dark hair, with no immediate destination in mind but to get away. His brother sat in the passenger seat, half-turned and looking back at the highway behind them, as though expected to be followed.

“What the hell were you thinking?!” he snapped at his younger brother.

Castiel shook his head. “I just. I. I don’t know.”

“Really? That’s all you’re going to give me?” Gabriel demanded, settling into his seat, satisfied there was no one hot on their trail. “You just put your life - all of our lives - on the line, and you don’t know?!”

Castiel let his foot ease off the accelerator, pulling over onto the shoulder of the empty stretch of highway they had been speeding down and putting the Jeep into park. He pulled his hands off the wheel, fingers stiff with their coating of dried blood, and put his head into his hands.

“I had to,” he finally mumbled. “He was going to die.”

Gabriel snorted, arms crossed over his chest. “Better one of them than one of us,” he said, and Castiel looked up.

“You can’t mean that,” he said, shaking his head. 

“We had an agreement, Castiel,” Gabriel replied evenly. “None of us - not one of us - would do anything that might draw attention. We wouldn’t do anything that people might notice and think was weird. Not anything, no matter the situation, no matter the consequences. Remember?”

Castiel let out a low breath. “I remember,” he agreed quietly. He folded his bloodied hands in his lap and stared down at them, still trembling from all that had gone on.

“Then why did you do it?” Gabriel demanded. He knew his brother too well; breaking so great a promise wouldn’t have happened on a momentary whim.

Castiel closed his eyes, wincing for what he knew would come. “Because it was him, Gabriel.”

The older man swore, pounding the hell of his hand on the dashboard. “I knew it. I fucking knew it! My own fucking brother just sold us all out, and for what? For WHAT, Castiel? A fucking crush!”

Castiel turned towards his brother, eyes and expression pleading for understanding.

“I couldn’t,” he told his brother. “I couldn’t let it happen, Gabriel. I couldn’t let Dean die, not when I could do something to stop it.”

“At the expense of your own life? Your brother’s?” Gabriel replied, still incredulous. “At the expense of Anna’s? Christ, Castiel, look what you’ve done. You’ve exposed us, all of us.

“I couldn’t let him die,” Castiel repeated with a sigh.

“Great. Fucking fantastic, Cas,” Gabriel told him, shaking his head. “We’re all gonna be, what? Hunted down? Strapped to tables, dissected alive? But your pretty boy crush is gonna be a-ok, so that’s all that matters.”

Castiel shook his head. “It’s not that,” he protested. “It’s not a crush, Gabriel. He doesn’t even know me. He’s just… he’s good, Gabriel. I can see inside him and it’s so beautiful, he’s so good… I couldn’t let him die.”

Gabriel groaned and leaned back, pounding his head back against the headrest of the passenger seat. Of his brother’s many talents, that one was his least favorite; they all had their little quirks, but Castiel was different, able to manipulate molecular structure like the rest of them, but also able to see some part of others that Gabriel and their friend Anna were both blind to see. Gabriel thought it was an aura of some sort, and Anna thought perhaps it was a soul, but neither was really sure; all they knew was that Castiel could look at someone and see inside them, not their thoughts but the stuff they were made off, all the good and the bad and a sadness and the joy, mingled together into something that would tell him who they really were.

Gabriel figured his brother must be on to something with this Dean kid, at the least. Gabriel himself had witnessed the guy pull the waitress out of the way and take a bullet for her. 

He supposed it must add up to something. But it still put them in danger.

“Ah, shit, Cas,” he groaned, hands on his head. “That waitress probably saw it all, too! The blonde with the big mouth. We are so fucked, man.”

Castiel sighed. “We had better call Anna,” he relented.

Gabriel snorted. “We? No way, man. You’re the one who pissed the bed here, you get to lay in it. You’re gonna call her, and tell her everything.”

 

Sheriff Mills was skeptical, but she let Dean go home after he insisted for a good half hour that he was fine and didn’t want to see a doctor. If his father hadn’t been John Winchester, a local state trooper, she probably would have pushed a little harder to get the younger man into the ambulance that had been called, rather than have taken him at his word in deference to his father. 

Dean was glad of it; the dim lighting of the Roadhouse might have helped mask the staining on his t-shirt, but the lie about the marinara sauce wouldn’t have stood under the close scrutiny and bright lighting of a hospital emergency room. His own memories of the entire affair muddled and confused, Jo had whispered frantically over what she had seen before he had gone home.

Dean’s father had been fit to burst, clapping him on the shoulder with a proud ruddy grin.

“That was a good thing you did, son,” John Winchester had proclaimed. “Might make a real man outta you even yet, boy.”

“Thank you, sir,” Dean mumbled in response, slipping away to his bedroom as quickly as he could.

Once alone, he peeled off his t-shirt and inspected the damage. It wouldn’t stain; it was a black shirt, after all, and the mess would wash out easily, not damaging the latex letter displaying the Roadhouse logo. The real problem, though, was the tattered nickel-sized hole just below the logo. Sitting on his bed, shirt in his hand, Dean poked a finger through, staring at the damage. If what Jo had said was true, it would have been made by a bullet.

He ran a hand over his chest, the skin smooth and free of blemish, no scrape or cut or even a graze wound. It just didn’t make any sense at all. He felt fine -- better even than he had in years, the shoulder he had torn in junior varsity baseball not even aching as it usually did.

It didn’t make sense. He couldn’t possibly have been shot, could he?

Dean remembered the pain, the confusion and the cold. He had been a high school athlete and a party to enough schoolyard brawls to know what it felt like to have the breath knocked out of him by a blow or a fall; that was not what had happened in the Roadhouse.

He turned his t-shirt over in his hands again, noting the orange marinara stains on his hands and the print logo. It felt strange and stiff in his hands, and on a whim, Dean turned it inside out. 

The inside of the shirt was thick with a dark rusty red crust, and when Dean held it to his nose the scent of copper overpowered even the tomato and garlic from Jo’s mother’s famous spaghetti dinner. When he pulled away, he noticed something wide embedded among the crusty substance, and flicking it out, his blood ran cold.

In the palm of his hand sat what could only be a shard of bone.

 

“Dean?” a voice asked from his doorway, and his head shot up quickly, crumpling the shirt and tossing it behind himself on his bed.

Castiel’s parting words seemed to echo in his mind: Please don’t tell.

Dean forced himself to brighten. “Hey, Sam,” he asked his gangly little brother. “What’s up?”

“Dad said somebody had a gun at the Roadhouse,” Sam said, inching into the room. “You okay?”

Dean laughed. “‘Course I am, Sammy. Nobody could get the drop on me, right?”

The childlike nervousness that Sam had shown first approaching the door quickly slipped away and was replaced with teenage petulance as the younger boy crossed his arms and rolled his eyes.

“Yeah right,” he said, shaking his head. “Surprised you didn’t wet your pants and run away!”

Dean snorted and reached out to smack at his brother, surprised when Sam suddenly frozen up and took a step back.

“Jesus Christ,” Sam swore, hazel eyes gone wide and staring. “Dean, what the hell is that?” he asked, pointing at his brother.

Dean panicked a brief moment, scanning his chest for wounds of blemishes that he had missed, but just as quickly relaxed when he saw nothing was there. Rolling his eyes, he reached out and shoved his younger brother.

“Yeah, real funny, Sam,” he said, shaking his head.

“No, seriously, Dean,” Sam told him, pointing again. “Look. There, on your arm!”

Dean frowned, then followed his brother’s gaze, swearing under his breath as his eyes lit upon what Sam was pointing at. There, on his bicep, was a deep red brand in the perfect shape of a human hand.


	3. Chapter 3

Anna dumped out her bag of french fries into the small cardboard container that had, until recently held a hot dog. They all had their flavor preferences, Castiel wanting fiery hot spiciness while Gabriel leaned towards confections, as sweet and sugary as he could get them. For Anna it was salt, the saltier the better, and she shook a small mountain of the stuff atop her fries before shaking the container to spread it around.

The three of them were seated at one of many picnic tables outside of a small permanently parked food truck. The place mostly junk foods, hot dogs and burgers, tacos and fries, and the three had been meeting there regularly since as soon as they were able to drive. 

Gabriel was working his way through a huge dish of soft serve ice cream, while Castiel stared morosely at a cheeseburger drenched in the hot sauce he kept in the glove compartment of his Jeep. His current brand was called Widow, and came packaged with a plastic spider; not as hot as he usually liked it, but he had thought the label was kind of cool. As good as his meal looked, he seemed to have lost all appetite under Anna’s continuing lecture.

“Maybe it’s a good thing,” She said suddenly, french fry paused halfway to her lips. She stopped and reached out across the table, dragging her fry through a swath of Gabriel’s ice cream and ignoring his noises of protest. “I mean,” she went on, popping the fry in her mouth, “It’s not like we could stay in Roswell forever, right? Maybe it’s time to bail.”

Gabriel and his brother both frowned.

“I wasn’t plannin’ on going anywhere anytime soon,” Gabriel told her, batting her searching hand away from his ice cream as she attempted to scoop up more of it with another french fry.

“I’m taking classes here,” Castiel reminded her. “And I have a job.”

“We have family to think about too,” Gabriel piped up.

Anna rolled her eyes in disgust. “Yeah. Family,” she said bitterly.

 

When three children had been found wandering together down the highway some thirteen years prior, professing only to know their first names, there had been a small flurry of offers of adoption. The two boys, who had insisted they were brothers, had been taken in by the Malcolms, a kindly childless couple who had always wanted a family. The girl, Anna, had been given a home with the Reverend Milton and his wife.

The reverend had, of course, been much lauded for his kindness, taking in the wiry little redheaded girl and raising her in his church. But as the years passed and Mrs. Milton along with the, the reverend became less of a reverend at all and more of a full time drinker and part time preacher. He never finalized the adoption of the girl, choosing instead to collect a monthly foster check from the state and, in more recent years, to remind her daily that she wasn’t his kin, just another mouth to feed that he had so graciously accepted into his home, particularly so after she turned eighteen and the money from the state had stopped coming.

Any affection Anna had held for the man seemed to die with his wife. If her financial circumstance had allowed it, she would have been long gone; instead, she survived by working at a tacky alien-themed tourist attraction, saving up what she could, and spending as little time at home as possible.

It would be easy as pie to leave it all behind and start somewhere new.

 

Castiel sighed. “Anna, I’m sorry,” he relented, frowning down at his cheeseburger again. “I didn’t mean to make this any more difficult for you. I know you haven’t had it easy.”

The redheaded girl snorted. “To put it lightly,” she told him.

“I think we’ll be alright,” Castiel went on, looking up to face her head on. “I don’t think Dean will say anything, I asked him not to. He’s got no reason to turn on us, and, really, it’s only me that he’d have any idea about anyway.”

Anna’s hazel eyes went suddenly wide, nostrils flaring with sudden anger even as Castiel realized his mistake and groaned.

“Dean?” she asked. “Dean Winchester? Castiel, god damn it all, you risked all of our lives for your fucking high school crush?!”

Castiel had chosen his words carefully when he asked Anna to meet him and Gabriel that day, and even more so when explaining all that had gone on. He had stressed the violence of the situation, and how bad the injury had really been; if he hadn’t intervened, Dean would have died in seconds, the bullet somehow shattering his sternum and sending shards of bone piercing through his lungs. Castiel hadn’t mentioned, however, who the injured man had been, letting her believe it was just a random patron of the Roadhouse, a tourist or even a townie they didn’t know very well. 

It was a popular stop on the main drag in town, after all. Castiel and Gabriel frequented it well enough on their own, Castiel bearing a certain affection for the owner’s brand of hot wings and Gabriel charmed by the sheer amount of sugary grenadine they would pour into his cherry Coke. He had been careful not to tell her it was Dean, knowing her reaction would be much the same as Gabriel’s.

He had been a grade above Dean for most of his academic career, but that never stopped Castiel from noticing the green-eyed boy with the easy laugh and bowlegged stance as they both traversed the hallways of their high school. What drew him more was the way Dean seemed to shine from the inside out, a brightness held within that Castiel had never witnessed before in anyone else. If Castiel would later wax poetic about those same green eyes to Anna or his brother in his less guarded moments, well, how could he really be blamed for it? 

“Tell me this isn’t because of your stupid crush, Castiel,” Anna demanded, leaning forward across the picnic table. She forced Castiel to meet her gaze, almost glaring at him. “Tell me you didn’t put all three of our lives on the line because of a boy that you had a crush.”

Castiel held her gaze as steadily as he could for a long moment, before he broke.

“Anna, he would have died!” he told her, and the redhead groaned, flopping her face into her palms.

Maybe she hadn’t been as happy or as well off as the brothers had been in Roswell, but Anna hadn’t held any immediate plans to leave. She had still been saving up her money, trying to get a decent nest egg together to start a new life, even if it had to be on her own. She wasn’t nearly there yet, much as she had tried to rationalize leaving town right there and then. Hearing that she had been put in the situation to make that choice at all as a result of a teenage crush held far too long by Castiel was just short of infuriating.

Castiel turned to his brother for help.

“Gabriel, please,” he said quietly. “Tell her that I had to do it. Tell her I couldn’t let him lay there on the floor and bleed to death, please.”

Gabriel returned his gaze evenly. “So,” he said by way of reply, “Do you think they’ll do a live dissection, or at least kills us before they start carving us up?”


	4. Chapter 4

The handprint mark on Dean’s arm didn’t fade, as he thought it might do as time passed. It didn’t hurt, the skin wasn’t at all raw or painful or peeling, even though it looked like the remnants of a deep burn or even a brand. It was warm and smooth to the touch, sending a strange little thrill up and down Dean’s spine when he let his fingertips trail across it.

He wondered what it was from, and why it had stayed.

He wondered what it would feel like if the other man touched him there again.

 _Castiel_ , he thought, lost in his own head even as he mopped the kitchen floor at the Roadhouse. He wasn’t wearing his uniform t-shirt, just a plain black one from his own hamper, and Ellen had relegated him to the back of the house for the night because of it. He explained to her as best he could, stumbling over his words as he went, that the staining from his fall had been just too much and he had thrown the shirt away rather than trying to wash it. 

His boss had frowned but, happier to have him alive and have to order a new shirt than to have him dead on the dining room floor, had said she would simply order him a new one.

For the time being, however, he would remain behind closed doors during business hours.

“Think of it like getting a break, kid,” Ellen had told him. “Gotta be a little stressful out there now for you anyway, what with your near-miss and all.”

Dean had nodded gratefully and accepted her terms, busying himself that night doing prep work for meals and cleaning when there was nothing else for him to do. He was just glad she had bought his story; he had actually washed the shirt, cleaning away the blood and sauce, hoping he’d get a better look at the tear in it and find it just a jagged cut from the shattered plates or glasses that had hit the floor beneath him the day it all happened, but there had been no such luck. Clean and free of any mess, the bullet hole was even clearer; a little jagged around the edges, of course, but still easily recognizable to anyone who had seen a good action film or a forensics special on television.

Dean didn’t even know what to think.

“Castiel,” he said aloud, quietly to himself in the empty kitchen. The grill shut down at nine o’clock and the bar was the main source of income after then, leaving him alone to clean up the last of the day’s messes. He spent the time turning that day’s events over and over in his mind, and it always came back to that singular name: _Castiel_.

He had known the other man, as children and as teenagers. He was a year or two older, Dean thought, but their school system had always been happy to mix grades and ages together, thinking it better for the growth and maturity of the children to spend time out of their own age bracket, so they had seen much of each other.

He thought they had even taken a few classes together in high school. Spanish II. Biology Lab. Crossing paths over and over again through the years, seeing each other at parties from shared acquaintances or nearby neighbors, even attending Eastern New Mexico University, like most of their former classmates.

Dean paused his mop, remembering a day not long ago during the spring semester, when he had passed Castiel on campus, and taken a flyer from the other man, something about a fundraiser for a protected desert species or something, printed on bright blue paper.

Not as blue as his eyes, Dean’s traitor mind told him, and he was struck suddenly by the full force of his memory of that day, the day he had been shot; lying on the floor, bleeding, the numbness and the cold, and those blue eyes looking down at him, so worried, so afraid.

Had there been tears? Dean couldn’t remember, though when he sat up later his own face had been damp and red from his own. 

He remember the feel of the other man’s hand, cradling his head. Moving to rest a palm flat against his chest, his broken and bleeding chest. The sudden warmth and the light that even Jo saw. The hand gripping his arm.

 _Please don’t tell_ , Castiel had said, had whispered, really. 

Dean hadn’t responded but had nearly promised it with the grateful look in his eyes alone.

He couldn’t tell, not even if he wanted to; he still didn’t entirely understand what had happened.

 

Sighing to himself, Dean leaned his mop against the counter and pushed up the sleeve of his shirt with his freed hand, inspecting the handprint-shaped mark on his arm. It was raised up just a little, reminding him again of a healed burn or brand, something that would leave a permanent scar. He was tracing the fingertips burned into his skin and oblivious to his surroundings, not noticing when Jo crept in the room out of the back pantry.

“Sam said that it hadn’t gone away,” she volunteered quietly, causing him to jump and curse, knocking his mop to the floor. Dean pulled down his sleeve and bent to pick it up.

“Don’t know what you’re talkin’ about,” he replied gruffly. Something inside of him told him that he needed to hide it, keep all evidence of whatever had passed between him and the strange blue-eyed man that he had long thought he had known away from any prying eyes, even from those closest to him.

Maybe them more than anyone else.

“Don’t try and bullshit me, Dean, I was standing right there,” Jo told him, crossing her arms over her own uniform t-shirt.

Dean righted his mop and stood up, turning to face his friend. He could see the stubborn set of her jaw and her determined expression, dark blonde eyebrows raised high as she regarded her longtime friend.

“Hey, it was nuts out there that day,” Dean told her, forcing a casual smile. “We all thought we saw a lot of crazy shit, right? But it’s no big deal, I’m fine, you’re fine. Everything’s cool.”

Jo didn’t look the least bit convinced, bumping her hip against the counter to lean against it.

“What did I just say you to?” she replied, shaking her head. “I know what I saw then, and I know what I saw just now, same as Sam said was there. Some weird funky mark up on your arm where that weird kid grabbed you.”

“Weird kid?” Dean echoed, frowning. “Shit, Jo. Listen to yourself. You’ve known Cas Malcom as long as I have, long as everybody has. This isn’t some stranger, it’s just a kid from school. And like I’ve been tryin’ to tell you, I’m fine. Just took a header into a pile of your mom’s spaghetti,” he went on, trying another charming smile out on the girl.

Jo gave an annoyed sigh, rolling her eyes as she reached into the pocket of the dingy apron tied at her waist. She produced a pad of paper and threw it on the countertop between them, and nodded towards it.

“That look like spaghetti to you, Dean?” she asked.

Dean’s eyes widened as he stared at it; it was one of the Roadhouse order pads, the kind that Jo and everyone else on the waitstaff kept tucked into their apron or pocket as they traversed between the bar and tables in the front of house. It looked ordinary enough, the Roadhouse logo stamped atop the page and some of Jo’s familiar handwriting already scribbled there. What made it different, however, from what everyone else carried, was the rust-colored splatter stains across the front of it.

“I was standing right there,” Jo repeated forcefully. “I got blood all over me, Dean, your blood. Then this kid you say we’ve known forever shows up and suddenly you’re sitting up without a scratch? Don’t get me wrong, nothing makes me happier than seeing you up and about and not stretched out dead on the ground. But something happened that day, Dean, and I want to know what the hell it was!”

Dean sighed and leaned back against the counter, hand creeping up the back of his neck as he stared at the order pad stained with his own blood.

“I don’t know,” he finally relented, voice dropped an octave.

“You were shot,” Jo filled in.

Dean nodded. “I was shot,” he agreed, admitting it full for the first time since it had happened. He had been shot, point blank, in the chest. And yet he stood there without a wound, only the odd handprint shaped mark on his upper arm.

“Sheriff Mills got those guys, you know,” Jo went on. “Holed up a few miles outside of town or something. Says they’re going away for a long time, since they both had guns full of them special bullets, the ones they make to cut through police vests. The kind that blows up once it gets inside you, tearin’ up everything inside.”

Dean’s eyes closed, remembering the rusty sludge on his shirt, full of what he was sure had been more than just blood, thick with pulverized skin and organ matter, the shard of bone that had fallen out into his palm.

“I think… I think I’m s’posed to be dead,” he admitted, opening mossy green eyes full of confusion and worry to peer back at his friend.

“And Cas…” Jo went on, speaking what they were both thinking. “Castiel Malcolm. Dorky kid one grade up from us, always asked over-complicated questions in class, skipped lunch and hung out with his weirdo brother in band room… this kid, right, that we’ve both seen around since we were like six or seven years old…”

“He did something,” Dean agreed with a sigh. “He… he touched where I was... I was shot. Did something, I don’t know what, and…”

“And you’re back up walking and talking like a real live boy while he and his brother bail out of the place like it’s on fire,” Jo added. “Meanwhile he left, what? His handprint? All over your arm there.”

Dean sighed again. “Sounds about like you got the whole story already without me,” he told her. “I don’t know any more than that.”

Jo shook her head, blonde tresses swinging free. “You know something else,” she corrected. “He said something to you, before he took off. I saw him do it, but I couldn’t hear over all the screaming and the sirens.”

Dean scrubbed his hands over his face, running one back through his hair and taking a deep breath, before turning back to face her.

“He asked me not to tell.”

**Author's Note:**

> Follow me on [Tumblr](http://literatec.tumblr.com), if you wish.
> 
> Please do not add this, or any of my posted works, to Goodreads. Thank you.


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